Friday, 6 November 2009

It is early November and the Irish Times has lost weight

The Irish Times 5th November 09 edition arrived yesterday. What has happened to the property supplement?

Last week there were sevel pages with a lot of colour ads for estate agents, but this week.... There are eight pages only.

It is very thin. Traditionally the paper's property section takes an August break and Christmas break, however it looks like the winddown to Christmas is very early this year.

There is colour on page one and page 8, but all the rest is black and white. Is this like the state of the Irish property market?

As you will see from the photo above there is an ad for a developer on the bottom of the front page and page 2 has the traditional "Take Five" where an Irish property is for sale for so many euro and they show what you can buy for the same amount of money in different countries like France, Spain, Portugal. England, Croatia, South Africa, Turkey etc.

On page 3 there is a full page ad for Ireland's leading estate agents Sherry Fitzferald - in "Black and White" and that is the only estate agents ad in the paper.

The property market in Ireland is not too good as shown on page 4 with the headline " That 40 per cent drop - it's already happened" going on to say that Economists have predicted that house prices have to fall by at least 40 per cent from the peak in 2006 and builders say that is already a reality.

However another headline is more positive " Business is booming for rental agent" reporting on the fact that diblinlettings.com has moved from cyberspace to an office in Pimlico Dublin 8. Hopefully they will succeed there as the lettings market appears good although who offers specialist rental insurance?

We can't find anyone and it seems like none of the UK specialists want to move into that market. At jml insurance we see a lot of enquiries from people in Ireland like one that came in today."Hi, i have a 2 bed apt in Dublin rented out. I wish to take out a home insurance policy especially for me as a landlord with the tenants. We paid 340,000 euro for the apt which is probably only worth 200,000 now in the current recession. I would like to get a quote if that is possible for landlord/tenant insurance. thanks" We know of a broker who has been trying to help and details can be found hereMany estate agents are probably still advertising in smaller circulation local and regional papers, hopefully, some must be using the Sunday papers more and the Internet, but either they can't afford to advertise or the Irish Times is too expensive.

Anyway, don't want the Christmas break starting too early as the agents won't after Sherry Fitzgerald reported a pre-tax loss of €15.5m on last year's business.